aGLIFF President Todd Hogan and Spotlighting Filmmaker Fernando Andrés Reflect on Identity

Todd Hogan, aGLIFF’s president, carries an unquestionable adoration for Austin’s oldest film festival. His memories of this and other festivals with a similar spirit of telling queer stories allows even the hardest work days to be worth the sweat equity and lost hours of sleep.

“Queer film was just a big part of my coming out process, and it has been for a lot of queer people,” he says. “I really feel in some ways queer film saved my life in my 20s and 30s. No matter how I was feeling, how joyful or blue, I could always go to my little shelf of VHS tapes and find a queer title – that probably nobody else in my friend circle even knew of – that would kind of just calm my nerves and say it’s going to be OK.”

The real power of cultural film festivals like aGLIFF is their ability to bring all factions together in fellowship and celebration of oneness. “Queer film festivals really started as a way for gay and lesbian people to have somewhere outside of the bar scene to come together and share stories and just find community,” Hogan says. “We are celebrating 37 years this year, and a lot has changed over that time. Thankfully, we don't really need those spaces that much anymore, but that doesn't mean that the power of these stories and the preservation of these stories is not still paramount to the fights that, unfortunately, we're still fighting. The last three years have just been brutal in the fight for human rights and LGBTQ rights, and the agenda of a certain party is very clear. It's in writing, and it's out there in public.”

This sentiment rings like a mid-Eighties anthem about the importance of rebelling against a system hellbent on suppressing your freedom to express. That very theme drove the creative direction of the festival. “The story is kind of funny,” Hogan begins, the chuckle already on the surface. “I went on an ultimate Eighties cruise in February. There was a Beastie Boys tribute band that played on the cruise. It was amazing. It was like being at a Beastie Boys concert. So I came back, and we were kind of in the middle of the discussion about theme and artwork. I was sort of still riding the high from the Eighties cruise, so we started talking about this Beastie Boys cover band. I think it was Bears Rebecca Fonté, our artistic director, who said that could be our theme. ‘You gotta fight for your right to be queer!’”

Every aspect of the imagery was intentional, from the reference photo (Beastie Boys greatest hits compilation Solid Gold Hits) to what each character was wearing. “The nonbinary person has a male-female tattoo on their arm. The lesbian actually has a black triangle on her shirt. A lot of people don't even know the origins of the pink triangle, which was the symbol that gay men wore in the concentration camps back in Nazi Germany. But fewer people know that the black triangle was what lesbians wore. We took the boombox and we swapped it out for an old-school video camera, to kind of play off of that iconic imagery. I just think the artwork this year is so beautiful, and it really does showcase the diversity within our community.”

Identity is the throughline theme of PRISM 37. This year’s offerings range from the deeply personal to the comically universal. "We've got "Barbette + Fontaine," which is actually from a local media personality, John-Carlos Estrada, over at KEYE, and his co-director Zak Zeh. They've got a great short film out about Barbette – who is essentially a drag queen who had this really wonderful career overseas – and this Texas-based drag queen who has a lot of parallels and has been kind of obsessed with Barbette and takes a look at the parallels in her own journey. We're also doing a 20th anniversary [screening] of Brother to Brother. Rodney Evans is our Queer Black Voices mentor this year. Our shorts program on Saturday night, "Y'all Means All," has some great shorts by local and Texas-based filmmakers."

Opening night’s showpiece, director/co-writer Fernando Andrés’ Rent Free, errs on the side of hilarity. The buddy comedy – which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year – is an exploration of the humbling and oftentimes embarrassing reality of what we all identify as “The Struggle.” Lead characters and best friends Ben (Jacob Roberts) and Jordan (David Treviño) are essentially a microcosm of the rapid onslaught of life when it lifes at its hardest.

“I was thinking a lot about two things,” Andrés begins. “I was thinking a lot about my best friend and my relationship with him at the time, and how it had been shifting just over the last few years. But also thinking a lot about money. Thinking about financial hardships and the hustle of trying to make it as an artist in Austin, and honestly looking beyond that to just how money seems to be this invisible but ever-present force that kind of affects and distorts all of our relationships and all of the things in our lives.”

Ultimately, Andrés and writing partner Tyler Rugh’s story is a conversation about identity, the many masks and personalities we wear in order to navigate the dumpster fire that is life. Andrés, as with most in that weird middle space between millennial and Gen Z, converses with himself and those around him to figure out what it is we’re all trying to figure out: How does one adult? The answers, perspectives, and end results can frequently lead to feelings of confusion, introspection, and most urgently, a lack of resources to do the stuff living as an adult requires. So why not have a chuckle while trying to figure it out?

“Those are pretty heavy things,” he says, “but I think that I wanted to find a way to tackle those themes in a way that you wouldn't expect. That's kind of what led to the format of a lighthearted comedy. A buddy comedy, at that. A subversion of a once very common studio comedy genre, and just turning that on its head and using that to explore those themes.

“I'd love for [audiences] to come away reflecting on their friendships and reflecting on some of the things that got brought up in the film, however they want to interpret that,” he continues. “Like I said, there's those themes of money, but also the inherent kind of transactional nature of all our relationships. Also just reflecting on the identity of Austin as a city, as reflected in this film. Thinking about how much things are different from maybe the earlier heyday of the Austin indie film scene, the way that the city used to be back then, how it was reflected in those films, and how different the outlook is for this generation.”

Hogan can certainly attest to this need for film festivals of aGLIFF’S ilk – hosting a variety of narratives that naturally intersect at each line of identity. “There's a lot of intersectionality in the queer community,” Hogan says. “Intersectionality in the queer community is, I think, particularly important because it really does cross every single one of the lines you can be. Being queer is not exclusive to any one community.”

These lines of commonality extend to the idea of generational growth. Our elders and ancestors fought so hard for spaces like aGLIFF, where creatives could freely express themselves without fear of persecution.

“A lot of times I get comments from our older cohort that they don't really understand what's going on with these young people and their pronouns and all of the different letters and numbers and the acronym now. My response to that is, ‘Well, that's what we were fighting for! These are the freedoms that we were fighting for,’” Hogan says. “It's so great to see the young generation embracing fluidity when it comes to gender roles and sexuality. I think it's a really beautiful thing, and I think that's where our festival can really make a difference. To think the older generation could come and see a movie about a nonbinary person or a transgender person and better understand why both of those stories are important to the LGBTQ spectrum and experience. Conversely, the younger generation could learn a thing or two.

"You don't have to be queer to come to the LGBTQ Film Festival," he continues. "These are human stories, and while, yes, they are about queer people, I think what's cool is we're at a time where we don't have to make movies about coming out and being infected with HIV anymore. We are making movies just about our experiences, and you don't have to be queer to enjoy these stories and these films."

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aGLIFF begins Wednesday, Aug. 21 with Fernando Andrés’ Rent Free at AFS Cinema and runs through Saturday, Aug. 25 on various screens across Austin. Find out more at aGLIFF’s official website. Read more Chronicle aGLIFF coverage here.